WARNING: I use Megapov 0.5 but I'm sure this is a povray general
question.

Often when doing some projects that involve really intense parsing, such
as 50 000 interations of forces between 10 particles, I run into a
problem.  Simple mouse clicks and even switching between programs such
as povray and my POVRAY.INI Notepad session cause hard drive crunching.
This is the kind of thing that I'm sure is fixable by rebooting and is
due to povray's temporarily using up all the resources--often my Windows
clock is even delayed a few hours.

Q: What built-in system tool could I run on Win98 to determine whether
my fixes--closing & reopening povray, rebooting, waiting an hour, etc.--
have brought things back up to normal:
a) System Monitor: what do I look for?
b) Resource Meter: what do I look for?

Thanks.

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"Greg M. Johnson" wrote:
> 
> WARNING: I use Megapov 0.5 but I'm sure this is a povray general
> question.
> 
> Often when doing some projects that involve really intense parsing, such
> as 50 000 interations of forces between 10 particles, I run into a
> problem.  Simple mouse clicks and even switching between programs such
> as povray and my POVRAY.INI Notepad session cause hard drive crunching.
> This is the kind of thing that I'm sure is fixable by rebooting and is
> due to povray's temporarily using up all the resources--often my Windows
> clock is even delayed a few hours.
> 
> Q: What built-in system tool could I run on Win98 to determine whether
> my fixes--closing & reopening povray, rebooting, waiting an hour, etc.--
> have brought things back up to normal:

> a) System Monitor: what do I look for?

"Memory manager: Allocated memory"
"Memory manager: Swap file in use"

The disk crunching is Windows having to swap out enough stuff to be able
to load back into memory the snippets of machine code needed to process
your mouse clicks, or open Notepad, etc...  It gets very brutal when one
app is using so much memory that Windows has to swap itself out only to
realize a few microseconds later "hey I need that DLL" and swap
something else to reload the code in memory and then swap it back out...

Make sure that if you kill (or nicely ask it to stop) MegaPov, your
allocated memory goes back down to the level it was before you started
your render.

I once had a recursive tree macro that went a few levels too deep and
the parsing caused so much swapping that even ctrl-alt-del took minutes
to be processed.

> b) Resource Meter: what do I look for?

Kernel resources.

Kernel resources measure the number of processes, memory chunks
allocated, system hooks, etc... A program that allocates a
234574897346246 small bits of memory will use up more resources than a
program that allocates one big chunk of memory larger than the total
amount of memory used by the former.

User and GDI resources are less of a problem here as they monitor the
resources used to manage the number of opened windows, controls, etc...
that are drawn on screen, which is not astronomical when using Megapov.

-- 
Francois Labreque | Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a snooze
    flabreque     | button on a cat who wants breakfast.
        @         |      - Unattributed quote from rec.humor.funny
   videotron.ca

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(replying to self...)

I forgot to add that things might improve a bit if you stop unnecessary
apps that appear to be just just sitting there in the background, but
are in fact monitoring system activty or relying on timers to do their
bit, as they will run for short periods of time every so often and need
to be swapped in, such as screen-savers, anti-virus softwares,
config-watchers, system-tray tools, real-media apps, etc...

-- 
Francois Labreque | Unfortunately, there's no such thing as a snooze
    flabreque     | button on a cat who wants breakfast.
        @         |      - Unattributed quote from rec.humor.funny
   videotron.ca

Post a reply to this message

"Francois Labreque" <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote in message
news:3A59C43C.E2909DF0@videotron.ca...
> (replying to self...)
>
> I forgot to add that things might improve a bit if you stop unnecessary
> apps that appear to be just just sitting there in the background, but
> are in fact monitoring system activty or relying on timers to do their
> bit, as they will run for short periods of time every so often and need
> to be swapped in, such as screen-savers, anti-virus softwares,
> config-watchers, system-tray tools, real-media apps, etc...
>

    If you're feeling brave[1] and you're running win98[2] you could try
using the System Configuration Utility to customize what programs and
drivers load at start-up - I found the SCU exe (MSCONFIG.EXE) installed in
my windows\system directory - you can even use it to have windows ignore
individual lines of your config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini & win.ini - so
you can, as I have, set-up 2 shell= lines in your system.ini, one that
launches explorer.exe, for normal windows, and one that launches POV (or
MegaPOV) as the shell - allowing you to get maximum performance out of POV
under windows!!!

--
Scott Hill.
Software Engineer.
E-Mail        : sco### [at] innocentcom
PGP Key       : http://pgpkeys.mit.edu:11371
Pandora's Box : http://www.pandora-software.com

*Everything in this message/post is purely IMHO and no-one-else's*

[1] Actually you don't need to be all that brave, the SCU has Create/Restore
backup buttons in case you're worried about screwing everything up.

[2] You may find it's available in 95 - I've never seen it on a 95 platform,
but then I only discovered it a month or two ago and, if you do have 98, and
can't find it - I have 98SE and it may only be available in SE, but, have a
look on you win98 CD (check in the cab files (winzip'll read 'em)) - it may
just have not got installed.

Post a reply to this message

"Scott Hill" <sco### [at] innocentcom> wrote in message
news:3a5a2617$1@news.povray.org...
> "Francois Labreque" <fla### [at] videotronca> wrote in message
> news:3A59C43C.E2909DF0@videotron.ca...
> > (replying to self...)
>
[snip]
>     If you're feeling brave[1] and you're running win98[2] you could
try
> using the System Configuration Utility to customize what programs
and
> drivers load at start-up - I found the SCU exe (MSCONFIG.EXE)
installed in
> my windows\system directory - you can even use it to have windows
ignore
> individual lines of your config.sys, autoexec.bat, system.ini &
win.ini - so
>

In Windows 98SE try:

Start / Programs / Accessories  / System Tools / System Information /
Tools / System Configuration Utility


Alf

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